“The Jeffrey Dahmer Files”: That nice young man in Apt. 213

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:55:00 +0000

Milwaukee in the early 1990s was a fairly typical middle-size, Middle American city, which is to say it was struggling with relatively high rates of crime, widespread urban blight and all the effects of the collapsing industrial economy, including crack and unemployment. When burly, mustachioed homicide detective Pat Kennedy showed up at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street – in a working-class, largely African-American neighborhood -- on the night of July 22, 1991, he felt pretty sure he was a tough cop ready for whatever he might find: a drug deal gone wrong, a domestic dispute turned deadly or some other variation on the familiar themes of urban violence.

What Kennedy walked into was a case that no one, anywhere, would have expected. Hardened police officers, as Kennedy and building resident Pamela Bass remember it, were disheveled and vomiting; the handcuffed suspect – a white man, unexpectedly – was howling like an animal. A foul stench filled the air, a combination of putrefying flesh and industrial chemicals. One of the ashen-faced uniformed cops inside Apartment 213 told Kennedy to look in the refrigerator. As everyone who’s ever read the gruesome details of the Jeffrey Dahmer case knows, there was a severed human head in a cardboard container inside that fridge, along with a few other dismembered body parts – and those were only the first of many gruesome discoveries in that apartment. Kennedy also noticed an open box of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the back of the fridge, and remembered that his own mother used to do the same thing. On the inside of the door, he recalls, “There were condiments: mustard, ketchup, A-1 Sauce, that kind of thing.”

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“The Jeffrey Dahmer Files”: That nice young man in Apt. 213